Elisabeth (Betty) Hayes is a professor in the Division of Learning, Technology and Psychology in Education at ASU’s Graduate School of Education. Prior to joining the ASU faculty in 2007, she was a professor of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was a founding member of the Games, Learning, & Society research collective. Betty discovered the potential of The Sims as a starting point for girls’ IT learning while doing initial research for the TechSavvy Girls project, funded from 2006 to 2009 by the MacArthur Foundation, as part of their Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Currently she is investigating how The Sims challenges, created by Sims fans, reflect a new form of game modding that integrates the development of IT skills, socio-emotional intelligences, and new literacies. For more information about Betty’s academic activities, see her ASU faculty profile.
Contact: elisabeth.hayes@asu.edu
Jayne Lammers is a doctoral student in Education at Arizona State University with a concentration in Language and Literacy. Her background includes technology experience conducting software training in corporate environments and educational experience as a middle- and high-school teacher. As a research assistant with the SimSavvy Project, she's found an exciting way to connect and expand on her previous work. In her dissertation research, Jayne is exploring how adolescents engage in multigenerational collaborative learning in Web sites organized around a multimodal literacy practice, The Sims story-telling, with the goal of exploring how learning these distinctive literacies may be recruited into adolescent literacy instruction.
Contact: jayne.lammers@asu.edu
Yoonhee Lee is a doctoral student in Education at Arizona State University with a concentration in Language and Literacy. She majored in computer science as an undergraduate, but she didn't realize the strong relationship between technology and learning, identity and gaming, and language/literacy and gaming until she worked with Dr. Gee and Dr. Hayes. Through the SimSavvy project, she became interested in different ways of learning in cyber game communities. The relationship between specialist language learning and the ways of constructing and contributing knowledge in cyber game communities is the focus of her dissertation research.
Contact: yoonhee.lee@asu.edu